Interrupting a robin’s meal
I was walking with my wife to the subway station this morning. I happened to catch a sharp movement in my peripheral. I turn my head and just inside a postage stamp front yard, I saw a robin with a freshly caught nightcrawler in its beak. The nightcrawler was curling and twisting to try to free itself. As we approached the robin skittered a meter up the adjacent driveway to protect itself and its quarry. It then dropped the nightcrawler. Perhaps to lighten the load in case it came to perceive us as a real threat and perhaps because the robin knew the nightcrawler wasn’t going to quickly go anywhere on concrete.
The nightcrawler continued to curl and twist on the concrete, appearing to try to find a way back down into the comfort of its intimately known dirt medium where its intimately embodied self made sense. We paused briefly to watch but I wanted to stop stressing the robin. It was not my place to hurt the robin by upending its meal this morning. Doing so may or may not have saved the nightcrawler; this wasn’t for me to control or decide or delay. Life is deeply interconnected, but the immediacy of survival is often a part of the way of things. Eventually, through multiple paths in the complicated web of existence, the robin will return to the living landscape of soil ecosystems that are home to other nightcrawlers. For now the soil makes up part of the robin, partly through being a source of nightcrawlers to devour and keep itself alive.
Observing nature like this brings me joy, contentment, and grounds my being into the reality that I am an animal in a way that allows words to be unnecessary in those moments, which helps me embody the Taoist concept of wu wei and enter a flow state. It helps me understand the way of things without reaching for something more. Of course, writing requires words. Here are some beautiful words by Thích Nhất Hạnh that I find helpful and healing…
“Most people are afraid of suffering. But suffering is a kind of mud to help the lotus flower of happiness grow. There can be no lotus flower without the mud.”
Suffering and happiness only exist in light of the other. May we learn how to transform our mud of suffering into beautiful lotuses of happiness, however temporary the lotuses might be. 🙏
